This CIA Torturer's $1.3 Million House Sure Looks Nice
This is a "Custom-Contemporary Cape Cod on 5 wooded acres" in Great Falls, Virginia, zoned for Langley High School. It's 4,240 square feet, has lovely features inside and out, and is really just a dream. For you. But it's just one of several homes that one CIA officer managed to own with all the money he made as a torturer.
The Intercept's Ken Silverstein tells the backstory behind this manse and Matthew Zirbel, aka "CIA Officer 1," a fixture in the Senate's just-released investigation into the U.S.'s use of torture on terror suspects:
Matthew Zirbel's home in Great Falls, Virginia is filled with oriental carpets, perhaps collected from his time spent working in countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The million dollar home has "LOTS of "WOW!" You will "Oooh & Ahhh", says this recent description on Zillow.
This isn't the first time Zirbel's surroundings have wowed someone. Over a decade ago, Zirbel, then a junior CIA officer, was in charge of the Salt Pit, a "black site" in Afghanistan referred to in the recent Senate torture report as "Cobalt," where detainees were routinely brutalized and which one visitor described as a "dungeon." A delegation from the Federal Bureau of Prisons was "WOW'ed" by the Salt Pit's sensory deprivation techniques, and a CIA interrogator said that prisoners there "literally looked like [dogs] that had been kenneled," according to the report.
In fact, one of the most horrifying stories – and there are many – in the Senate report on torture takes place in the Salt Pit, where Gul Rahman was murdered by the U.S. government in November 2002.
Check out this lovely eating nook in Zirbel's Great Falls home, which went for $1.3 million in 2006, but you can currently rent it for $4,500 a month:
Did you notice the Tibetan Buddhist wall-hanging? It's replete with bodhisattvas, enlightened beings who practice compassion for all beings and meditate on the impermanence of things. Like, say, the impermanent body of Gul Rahman, which was extinguished of life after Zirbel reportedly ordered the captive "shackled to the wall of his cell in a position that required him to rest on the bare concrete floor" overnight as the temperature in Zirbel's "dungeon" dropped to 36 degrees.
As you would expect in a stately home of this size, Zirbel's house features a truly impressive kitchen:
Nourishment is so important. That's why the CIA ensured its detainees got sufficient food and water by forcing "pureed and rectally infused" hummus, pasta with sauce, and nuts and raisins on some of them.
With five beds and four baths, Zirbel's house has plenty of space for family. Here's a great kids' room, with a crib and changing station:
I wonder where Rahman's wife and four children were when they learned of his death in 2010, after it was revealed in an AP story. I wonder if it's the same place they first learned that the U.S. government had slated him as unfit for detention, citing "mistaken identity."
Nobody's really sure if Zirbel still works for the CIA; he travels a lot in the Middle East, according to Silverstein, which is why you can chill in his lovely skylit guest bedroom:
Silverstein says it's possible that Zirbel's most recent string of jobs are CIA cover:
Seven years after his orders led to Rahman's death, Zirbel, who has been described as unfit for CIA employment, was working for one U.S. government agency or another in Saudi Arabia. In 2009, U.S. Customs records show that Zirbel shipped 26 containers of "House Hold Goods & Personal Effect" from the U.S. Consulate General in Jeddah to a home in Great Falls.
I can't imagine how much it might have cost to move, say, this piano from Saudi Arabia to Virginia:
Nor can I imagine what Zirbel's other places look like, if he doesn't want to live here year-round:
Public records show he owns several properties, including the house in Great Falls, which he bought in 2006 for $1.3 million and still owns... renters get to enjoy views of a stocked pond ("feel free to fish!" the ad says). There's also an "invisible fence," which is typically used to keep dogs from wandering off the property by delivering an electric shock through a collar.
Yep, easy livin'.